Premium, Mid-Grade and Regular

Free Will
Fuel Accountability
By Alfred Mele

s free will an illusion? Some people say

yes. Heres an example: Free will is
not the defining feature of humanness,
modern neuroscience implies, but is rather
an illusion that endures only because biochemical complexity conceals the
mechanisms of decision making, writes
science journalist Tom Siegfried in an article entitled The Decider in Science News
magazine on Dec. 6, 2008. Heres another:
Researchers have found patterns of brain
activity that predict peoples decisions up to
10 seconds before theyre aware theyve
made a choice, reports science writer Elsa
Youngsteadt in Case Closed for Free Will
in ScienceNOW Daily News on April 14,
2008. The result was hard for some to
stomach, she continues, because it suggested that the unconscious brain calls the
shots, making free will an illusory afterthought. More recently, in a Huffington
Post blog entry headlined Morality without
Free Will, posted on May 30, 2011, bestselling author and neuroscientist Sam Harris
contends that the concept of free will is a
non-starter, both philosophically and scientifically. There is simply no description of
mental and physical causation that allows
for this freedom that we habitually claim for
ourselves and ascribe to others.
If free will is an illusion, what about accountability? Without free will, can you
really be accountable for your actions?
There is evidence that reducing our confidence that we possess free will leads us to
see ourselves as less accountable. In one
study from a few years ago, people who
read passages in which scientists deny that
free will exists cheat more often on a subsequent task than others do.1 In another,
college students presented with sentences
denying the existence of free will e.g.,
that the system is rigged; that no choices
exist proceeded to behave more aggressively than a control group: The former
served larger amounts of spicy salsa to people who said they disliked spicy food,
despite being told these people had to eat

everything on their plates.2

Why does this happen? One plausible
explanation is pretty straightforward. As
your confidence that you have free will diminishes, your impression of yourself as
accountable for what you do weakens. If
youre not accountable, you really dont deserve to be blamed for your unseemly
actions. And believing that you cant be
blamed for acting on your dishonest or aggressive urges reduces your incentive to
control them. So you cheat or dish out unpleasantness like the subjects in the
experiments did.

Photo illustrations by Arnel Reynon from stock.xchng images

Theories of free will

Lets take a step back. What is free will
supposed to be anyway? If you were to interview people on the street, youd find
several different answers in circulation.
According to some people, free will is
housed only in nonphysical souls; its a
supernatural power. According to others,
whether or not souls exist, free will doesnt
depend on them. People in this latter group
divide into two subgroups. Some will tell
you that the ability to make rational, informed, conscious decisions in the absence
of undue force no one holding a gun to
your head is enough for free will. Others will say that something crucial must be
added, what I call a deep openness to possibilities. Let me explain. Sometimes,
perhaps, you would have made an alternative decision if things had been a bit
different. For example, if you had been in a
slightly better mood, you might have decided to buy two boxes of Girl Scout
cookies instead of just one. But this is not
enough for the kind of openness at issue.
What is needed is that more than one option was open to you, given everything as it
actually was at the time: your mood, all
your thoughts and feelings, your brain,
your environment, and, indeed, the entire
universe and its entire history.
We can think of the three different views
of free will that I just sketched deriving
from the soul or supernatural power; from

rational, conscious decision-making; and

from deep openness on the model of
standard fuel options at gas stations. Some
people opt for premium gas. Its analogous
to the soulful, supernatural conception of
free will. Others prefer mid-grade gas,
which corresponds to the idea of free will
that features deep openness and is noncommittal about souls. And still others are quite
happy with regular gas, an analogue to a
type of free will that highlights rationality
and the absence of force and is noncommittal about deep openness. I will not try to
assess these views here, for theres not
enough space for that; interested readers
might want to turn to my Free Will and
Luck (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Implications about
(un)conscious decisions
Almost everyone who believes in free
will no matter whether premium, midgrade, or regular free will believes the
brain plays an indispensable role in generating decisions. Even if a soul is involved,
it works through the brain somehow. The
threat that neuroscience is supposed to pose
to free will isnt based simply on the idea
that brains are at work in decision-making;
most people who believe in free will regard
that belief as entirely compatible with this
idea about brains. So what are we supposed
to worry about? That our decisions are produced unconsciously by our brains and that
we become aware of them only after the
fact. And why is that worrisome? Because
it seems that deciding freely depends on deciding consciously. If all your decisions are
made unconsciously, it seems that its not
up to you what you decide. And that certainly seems like bad news for free will.
There are several problems with the
claim that we are only unconscious deciders. I have space here to discuss just one.
And its this: We lack good evidence that
the brain events that experimenters use to
predict behavior are actually decisions.
Instead, these brain events seem to be processes that potentially influence decisions
Spring 2012

11

made a bit later.

Recall the news about patterns of brain
activity that predict peoples decisions several seconds before theyre aware theyve
made one. The predictions about whether a person will press one button or another
were correct about 60 percent of the
time. Now, by flipping a coin, I can randomly predict whether youll press button
A or button B about 50 percent of the time.
After much careful study of blood flow in
the brains of their subjects blood flow
correlated with brain activity that preceded
button presses by several seconds the researchers did better than that. But what
work was being done by the brain activity
on which they based their predictions? One
possibility is that this activity registered a
slight, unconscious preference for pressing
one of the two buttons. Such preferences
may influence decisions made by the subjects several seconds later. But preferences
are not decisions. And even though the
preferences Im speculating about were unconscious, the subjects might have made
their subsequent decisions consciously.
Return to the gas station analogy. People
who believe in premium free will may believe that unconscious preferences exerted
an influence on conscious, soulful decisions
in the experiment at issue. As long as the
soul can be influenced by the brain, they
have no special cause for worry. (I leave
the question of how a brain might influence
a soul, and vice versa, as an exercise for the
reader.) Fans of mid-grade free will may
take pleasure in the 60 percent accuracy
figure because it is consistent with deep
openness. Why? Because even at the very
moment a person decided to press button A,
perhaps deciding to press B was a genuine
option. Finally, those who regard themselves as having regular free will would
definitely be worried if they thought the experiment showed that we never consciously
decide to do anything. After all, like other
believers in free will, theyre convinced
that free decisions must be consciously
made. But, as I have explained, the experiment does not show that unconscious
decisions are made even in this particular
setting, where nothing at all hangs on
which button is pressed.
By the way, pressing button A when
nothing hangs on whether one presses it or
button B is a lot like grabbing a jar of peanuts from an array of identical jars at the
supermarket. Would it bother you to learn
that you had a slight unconscious preference for the jar you grabbed some time
before you actually grabbed it? Would it
make you worry about free will? Not me.
Free will seems to be most crucial when we
are making important decisions: Is it time
to seek a divorce? Shall I devote the next
six years to pursuing a Ph.D. in physics?
Should I report my supervisors shady activities at the risk of losing my job? Settling
these matters isnt much like grabbing a jar
of peanuts from a supermarket shelf or
12

Spring 2012

Almost everyone who believes

in free will no matter
whether premium, midgrade, or regular free will
believes the brain plays
an indispensable role in
generating decisions.
pressing a button in an experiment. So its
difficult to generalize from what we learn
about button pressing to what goes on when
we make important decisions. And, in any
case, we should not be at all surprised or
disheartened to learn that preferences we
dont know we have influence decisions
important to us. We all know that we arent
open books to ourselves.
Applications for ethical living
So is anyone really accountable for anything? My opening paragraph might have
caused you to worry that accountability is an
illusion. But whether you think that accountability depends on premium, mid-grade, or
regular free will, I hope Ive persuaded you
to be suspicious of those reports. As I see it,
not only is accountability widespread, but
widespread belief in it is extremely beneficial. If we all saw ourselves as wholly
unaccountable for our deeds, what would the
world be like? Would we cheat more, be
more aggressive, and help each other less?
Would we even exist? (The combination of
tons of nuclear weapons and billions of people who view themselves as devoid of
accountability is a recipe for annihilation!)
Belief in accountability is part of the fabric
of civilized life.
I see free will and accountability in a
positive light. In my view, they exist and be-

lief in them promotes human welfare. Some

people who agree with me about the existence of accountability and free will put a
negative spin on the topic; because free will
and accountability exist, extremely harsh
punishment of criminals is called for, they
argue. For the record, justifying punishment
has never played any role in my writing
about free will. My primary concern is to
get at the truth about a deep and important
issue. But I also worry about how claims
that scientists have shown that there is no
free will affect unsuspecting readers. Because I worry about that, I have some
independent motivation to expose errors in
these claims. If I were to remain silent about
those errors, Id hold myself accountable.
Journalists like to use examples featuring people we know to illustrate important
points. Im not a journalist, but thats not
the reason I havent used such examples
here. When the topic is accountability, the
people who spring quickly to mind are
those everyone loves to hate: Bernie
Madoff, say, or Adolf Hitler. This takes us
toward the dark side of things, but Ive
been steering toward the light. If you see
yourself as accountable for your future actions, youll view yourself as having
abilities and capacities on which accountability depends and therefore as having
considerable control over what you do
free will, if you like. As I see it, this view is
more accurate than pessimistic ones that
portray us as being entirely at the mercy of
forces beyond our control. Whats more,
theres evidence that belief in free will promotes personal well-being.3
Theres a lot to be said for free will and
accountability.
Alfred Mele is the William
H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister
Professor of Philosophy at
Florida State University and
directs its Big Questions in Free
Will Project (funded primarily
by the John Templeton
Foundation through a grant
to Mele). His books include Effective Intentions:
The Power of Conscious Will (2009); Free Will
and Luck (2006); Motivation and Agency (2002);
Autonomous Agents (1995); Springs of Action
(1992); and Irrationality (1987), all published by
Oxford University Press (OUP). He has edited
or co-edited numerous books, including Free
Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work?
(2010); Rationality and the Good (2007); The Oxford
Handbook of Rationality (2003); and The Philosophy
of Action (1997), all also published by OUP. Author
of hundreds of scholarly articles, encyclopedia
entries and book reviews, Mele earned philosophy
degrees from Wayne State University (B.A.) and
University of Michigan (Ph.D.) Go online to
www.freewillandscience.com or email him at
almele@fsu.edu.
For footnotes, go online to
www.phikappaphi.org/forum/spring2012.

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